Stephen Harper Biography

Stephen Harper (born 1959), an often-underestimated Canadian
politician, became his country's first conservative prime
minister in 13 years when he led his party to victory in January of
2006. Harper got into politics as part of a conservative revolt
against Canada's traditional center-right party, then rethought
his movement's strategy and engineered a merger between his
upstart right-wing party and the old center-right. As prime minister,
he has tried to increase his party's appeal while negotiating
with the other three parties in Parliament.

A Young Conservative

The future prime minister was born in Toronto, Ontario, on April 30, 1959.
He grew up in a middle class family in the Toronto suburbs. In 1978, after
graduating from high school, he moved to Alberta. He worked in the oil
industry there, and soon enrolled at the University of Calgary, a bastion
of conservative thinking, where he earned bachelor's and
master's degrees in economics. Harper and a fellow grad student
often debated politics and free market economic ideas outside of class,
avidly watched American conservative William F. Buckley's
television show
Firing Line
, and followed the careers of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the
conservative leaders of Great Britain and the United States.

Not impressed by the center-right politics of then-prime minister Brian
Mulroney's Progessive Conservative party, Harper joined the new
right-wing Reform Party, which was mostly based in Alberta, a conservative
province. The Reform Party made Harper its policy chief in 1987, and he
ran for a seat in the Canadian Parliament in 1988 and lost. In 1991 he met
Laureen Teskey, a graphic designer, at a Reform Party convention, and they
married. They have two children, Benjamin and Rachel.

In 1993 Harper again ran for Parliament, and won. He spent four years in
opposition to the center-left Liberal Party, which had won a majority.
Harper sharply criticized Liberal rule; he called Canada "a
northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term,"
meaning that he felt Canada had become too much like socialist-influenced
countries such as Sweden. He stepped down from Parliament in 1997 to
become vice president of the conservative activist group the National
Citizens' Coalition, which argued that the

federal government, with its power base in the eastern provinces of
Ontario and Quebec, was not concerned enough about western Canada. He
eventually became the coalition's president.

Leaving Parliament was a sign that Harper's political strategy was
changing. In a 1998 speech, he revealed that he had decided two years
earlier, during a vacation from Parliament after the birth of his son,
Benjamin, that the Reform Party could never win a nationwide majority on
its own. Reform's principles needed to be combined with the
Progressive Conservatives' "penchant for incremental change
and strong sense of honorable compromise," he said, according to
John Geddes of
Maclean's
. A few years later, Harper made such a merger happen. In 2002 he was
elected to Parliament again and successfully ran to replace social
conservative Stockwell Day as leader of the former Reform Party, renamed
the Canadian Alliance. That made him official leader of the opposition in
Parliament. In 2003 a new leader took over the Progressive Conservatives,
and Harper negotiated with him to merge the two parties, cofounding the
Conservative Party of Canada. Harper became head of the new party in March
of 2004.

Harper Took Power

Once Harper became Canada's opposition leader, the governing
Liberals did their best to portray him as a right-wing ideologue. They
often criticized his public statements from 2000 and 2001, in which he
contrasted conservative, free-market-friendly Alberta with the liberal
rest of Canada. In March of 2003, when the Liberal-led Canadian Parliament
came out against the United States and Great Britain's invasion of
Iraq, Harper rose to dissent, charging that the government had
"betrayed Canada's history and values," according to
Doug Struck of the
Washington Post
. "The government has for the first time in our history left us
outside our British and American allies in their time of need."

When a national election was scheduled in June of 2004, Harper ran as head
of the Conservatives. He would have replaced Paul Martin as prime minister
if the Conservatives had won. But Martin attacked Harper for supporting
the Iraq war, which was unpopular in Canada. Martin also pointed to
Harper's pro-American comments to suggest that he was too
sympathetic to conservative Republicans in the United States, especially
President George W. Bush, who was also unpopular among Canadians. The
charge was potent, since Canada's political culture is more liberal
than its southern neighbor's, and because Canadians often feel
overshadowed by the United States.

Personality was another factor in the race. Harper was still not well
known to Canadians, in part because he is unusually private for a
politician—"shy to the point of being aloof,"
observed Clifford Krauss of the
New York Times
. "He is known to have a fiery temper, and he barely disguises his
distrust for reporters. His sense of humor on the campaign trail was most
revealing in its self-deprecating jokes about his lack of
charisma." As a reporter for the
Economist
noted, "when a television reporter asked him to repeat on camera a
few sentences 'with feeling,' he shot back, 'I
don't do feeling.'" The Liberals won the election,
but the election still marked something of a comeback for Conservatives,
who increased their bloc in Parliament by 25 seats. That included some
wins in Ontario, usually a liberal stronghold.

Two years later, fate gave Harper another chance. The Liberals were
tainted by a scandal: a multi-million-dollar government public relations
fund in Quebec had been revealed to be a slush fund for Liberal
politicians and their supporters. When a new election was scheduled for
January of 2006, Harper, learning the lessons of his 2004 defeat, worked
to present himself as a moderate who had shifted from his earlier
hard-line conservatism. "Over the course of a decade,
people's views evolve somewhat and situations change," he
told reporters, according to Krauss. "I deal with the situation as
I find it." He stressed issues such as anticorruption reforms in
government, a sales tax cut, and longer prison sentences for criminals. He
deemphasized foreign policy and divisive social issues. He favored
increasing the size of the Canadian military and said he would reexamine
Canada's decision not to participate in the U.S. attempt to create
a missile defense shield, but he said he would not send troops to Iraq.

Martin again portrayed Harper as a right-winger too close to U.S.
conservatives, but this time the strategy did not work. The Conservatives
won the election, which took place on January 23, taking 124 seats, the
largest bloc in Parliament. Harper was sworn in as prime minister on
February 6. Because the vote was split among four parties, however, the
Conservatives won only about 36 percent of
the popular vote and did not win a majority in Parliament. Instead, Harper
became the leader of a minority government, which needs to attract votes
from one of the other parties to pass legislation.

Harper Was In Charge

Still a shrewd strategist, Harper immediately reached out to Quebec,
hoping to build conservative support there. It was a bold move, since
conservatives from Alberta, Harper's base, are usually opposed to
addressing mostly-French-speaking Quebec's long list of grievances.
But Harper quickly altered the federal budget to give the provinces more
control over spending, a popular move in both the west and Quebec. He also
gave Quebec a formal role in Canada's delegation to a United
Nations' cultural organization. The hope was that Quebec might
elect more Conservatives in the next national election, strengthening the
party's fragile plurality in Parliament. By November, Harper
introduced a bill into Parliament that would declare Quebec a separate
nation within a united Canada. He was aiming to pre-empt a similar
proposal written by the Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec separatist party in
Parliament, that would call Quebec a separate nation, without the
"united Canada" language. Harper's bill quickly
passed.

In May of 2006, Harper won a significant victory for his pro-American
foreign policy, but by the barest of margins. A bill to keep
Canada's contingent of 2,300 troops in Afghanistan passed
Parliament by a vote of 149 to 145. Ever since the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001 in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks,
Canada had participated in a multi-national force supporting the
democratic Afghan government. But the mission had become increasingly
unpopular in Canada. "We just cannot sit back and let the Taliban
or similar extremist elements return to power in Afghanistan,"
Harper argued, according to Krauss. The bill approved keeping the troops
in Afghanistan until early 2009. But by September, Harper was forced to
defend the deployment again. The Canadian troops suffered an increased
number of casualties in mid-2006 as they took a wider role in the
dangerous province of Kandahar. Four soldiers died in one day in
September, and a U.S. plane accidentally killed another Canadian soldier a
few days later. "The horrors of the world will not go away if we
turn a blind eye to them, no matter how far off they may be,"
Harper said in a speech commemorating the fifth anniversary of the
September 11 attacks, according to Christopher Mason of the
New York Times
.

As a candidate and opposition leader, Harper had spoken out against
Canada's 2005 legalization of gay marriage. But his attempt to
revisit the issue was rejected by Parliament in December of 2006 by a vote
of 175 to 123. The three other parties in Parliament opposed the bill, as
did 13 Conservatives.

As 2007 began, political commentators were anticipating that another
election would probably take place sometime that year, possibly as early
as spring, since minority governments in Canada usually only last a year
or two. Harper was assumed to be calculating the best timing to call the
election and strategizing how to increase his party's support among
voters. As Canadians continued to ponder their leader's strengths
and character, Paul Stanway, a columnist for the
Edmonton Sun
, sounded a sympathetic note. Harper's success at "reuniting
Canada's fractious conservatives and returning them to government
will surely stand as one of the great achievements of Canadian
politics," he declared, "particularly if he can produce a
majority government in 2007."

Periodicals

Chicago Tribune
, November 28, 2006.

Economist
, June 12, 2004.

Edmonton Sun
, December 31, 2006.

Maclean's
, June 14, 2004; May 9, 2005.

New Republic
, January 30, 2006.

New York Times
, March 21, 2004; January 16, 2006; January 25, 2006; February 11, 2006;
May 18, 2006; September 28, 2006; November 23, 2006.